Jules Verne’s story “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, published in 1864, tells the story of a group of people encountering an exotic environment after entering a volcano in Iceland and landing near the center of the Earth. As enjoyable as it is to read, there are too many elements that contradict scientific reality.
But what would actually happen according to science? The radius of our planet is 6,371 kilometers, only its crust is 40 kilometers. Although it seems unlikely for now to dig that deep by digging, let’s assume that we can go down using our imagination and see what happens.
After you had just dropped 150 meters (0.002% of the way to the center of the Earth), you would encounter an air pressure that you couldn’t handle.
As if that wasn’t enough, you would die from hyperoxia (oxygen poisoning). The lower your corpse fell, the more you would be crushed by the intense air pressure.
As you can see, it is impossible to go deep without dying. Well, let’s say you can wear an outfit that can protect you from all kinds of pressure. What happens if you fall into a hole with this pressure suit?
After falling about 1.1 kilometers, you would die of heatstroke as you would experience a temperature of about 50 degrees Celsius. As your body continued to fall and reached a depth of 2.7 kilometers, your body fluids would begin to boil, as the temperature would reach around 130 degrees.
When your dried bones and remnants of meat reached a depth of about 200 kilometers (3% of the way to the center of the Earth), it would encounter a temperature of about 930 degrees and completely burn to dust as if you had entered the crematoria. Your pollinated state would continue on and travel the remaining 6,171 kilometers to the center of the Earth.
As you can see, even if you wear a special suit that protects you from pressure, this time you would be burned to death.
Then let’s increase the protective factors even more; Let our special suit protect you from pressure, heat, toxic gases and radiation. What would happen if you jumped into the hole like this?
Since you will gain speed as you fall due to Earth’s gravity, after about 10 seconds, after falling 500 meters down, you would reach a maximum speed of about 200 kilometers. When you reach this speed, the air resistance you will encounter is high enough to prevent you from accelerating any further.
The deeper you go, the weaker the gravity will be. Both for this reason and because the air pressure will increase more, your speed will gradually decrease.
After about a week of falling, you would finally reach the very center of the Earth.
So this scene in the movie “Journey to the Center of the Earth” is just a fantasy. The reason why the drop took so long – as we emphasized before – is that you can reach a maximum of 200 kilometers, and after a short time this speed gradually decreases due to the increase in pressure and decrease in gravity.
The gravitational force at the center of the Earth is zero because there is an equal amount of matter in all directions and they all exert an equal gravitational force. Like this scene from the movie “Godzilla vs. Kong”:
Also the air inside the hole is so dense at this point it’s like walking around in a soup . Right at this point you have a little momentum, you can use it to get past the center of the Earth and continue through the hole.
But once past the center of the Earth, “down” is now in the other direction. Once you had crossed the center with your momentum, you would again fall slowly towards the center. You would end up floating at the center of the Earth.
So what would happen if we blew all the air out of this hole?
Since there would be no air, there would be no air resistance. Therefore, as you fell you accelerated to incredible speeds, you would see a top speed of tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. You would now reach the center of the Earth in just minutes instead of 1 week.
After you passed the center of the Earth, you would start to slow down because gravity would work in the opposite direction. As you exit the hole at the other end of the Earth, your initial stupendous speed now approaches almost zero. It would only take you 41 minutes to get in and out of one end. But in a scenario like not being able to get out the other end, you would go back and forth like a yo-yo from one end to the other.
A good example of this is found in the 2012 science fiction movie Total Recall. A train entering one end of the world and leaving the other could transport people from Australia to England in just 17 minutes.
This train, which can travel so fast using the power of gravity, is subject to a decrease in gravity as it passes through the middle of the Earth, and the passengers in it experience this situation. is experiencing. Fortunately, the movie does not go against science by not ignoring this important detail.
So how deep have we gone so far?
The huge hole you are looking at is located on the Kola Peninsula, near the Russian border with Norway, and has reached 12,262 meters below the ground. It has the title of “the deepest hole ever drilled vertically from the surface”.
Thanks to a new technology, it is possible to go down to a depth of 20 kilometers.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) subsidiary and energy firm Quaise is working to get to this depth using millimeter-long waves of electromagnetic radiation that fuse atoms. In this way, access to almost unlimited and clean geothermal energy can be provided.
We can say that this 20 kilometer hole is nothing compared to the 6,371 kilometer radius of the Earth. Still, it’s an important step forward for science and technology.
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